500 Server Error on Google App Engine, no clue why

Question

I'm consistently getting a 500 error when deploying a webapp that runs fine locally...

Error: Server Error

The server encountered an error and could not complete your request.
If the problem persists, please report your problem and mention this error message and the query that caused it.

The logs are not telling me anything other than my app has deployed succesfully...

11:50 PM Host: appengine.google.com
11:50 PM Application: suraj-kapoor; version: 1
11:50 PM 
Starting update of app: suraj-kapoor, version: 1
11:50 PM Getting current resource limits.
11:50 PM Scanning files on local disk.
11:50 PM Cloning 2 static files.
11:50 PM Cloning 6 application files.
11:50 PM Uploading 1 files and blobs.
11:50 PM Uploaded 1 files and blobs
11:50 PM Compilation starting.
11:50 PM Compilation completed.
11:50 PM Starting deployment.
11:50 PM Checking if deployment succeeded.
11:50 PM Deployment successful.
11:50 PM Checking if updated app version is serving.
11:50 PM Completed update of app: suraj-kapoor, version: 1
11:50 PM Uploading index definitions.
Password for [email protected]: If deploy fails you might need to 'rollback' manually.
The "Make Symlinks..." menu option can help with command-line work.
*** appcfg.py has finished with exit code 0 ***

here are the console logs. Note that there is PIL warning that comes as a standard warning. I did import the PIL module into my app in case but it didn't have any effect...

*** Running dev_appserver with the following flags:
    --skip_sdk_update_check=yes --port=14080 --admin_port=8006
Python command: /usr/bin/python2.7
INFO     2013-06-07 14:52:57,048 devappserver2.py:522] Skipping SDK update check.
WARNING  2013-06-07 14:52:57,086 api_server.py:329] Could not initialize images API; you are likely missing the Python "PIL" module.
INFO     2013-06-07 14:52:57,109 api_server.py:153] Starting API server at: http://localhost:57543
INFO     2013-06-07 14:52:57,115 dispatcher.py:164] Starting server "default" running at: http://localhost:14080
INFO     2013-06-07 14:52:57,127 admin_server.py:117] Starting admin server at: http://localhost:8006

and my app.yaml seems fine...

application: suraj-kapoor
version: 1
runtime: python27
api_version: 1
threadsafe: yes

handlers:
- url: /static
  static_dir: static

- url: .*
  script: main.app

libraries:
- name: jinja2
  version: latest
- name: webapp2
  version: "2.5.2" 

The webapp pulls in images from Instagram's API using JSON if that is anything to go by. I'm completely lost as to why I'm getting this error!

Here is the live log...

2013-06-07 08:34:21.516 /favicon.ico 500 11ms 0kb Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/27.0.1453.110 Safari/537.36
199.47.72.170 - - [07/Jun/2013:08:34:21 -0700] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 500 0 - "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/27.0.1453.110 Safari/537.36" "suraj-kapoor.appspot.com" ms=12 cpu_ms=0 app_engine_release=1.8.0 instance=00c61b117c22c59d63580abdad0f481f2f485295
E 2013-06-07 08:34:21.515
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/python27_runtime/python27_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/runtime/wsgi.py", line 196, in Handle
    handler = _config_handle.add_wsgi_middleware(self._LoadHandler())
  File "/python27_runtime/python27_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/runtime/wsgi.py", line 255, in _LoadHandler
    handler = __import__(path[0])
  File "/base/data/home/apps/s~suraj-kapoor/1.367922706590908179/main.py", line 7, in <module>
    import requests
ImportError: No module named requests

Answer 1

Sometimes the 500 really is caused by Google infrastructure. When they can detect this case, it should direct users to a much more specific support page. The general Google support page is useless for reporting and app engine outage.